Ron Arad

etched and engraved with a signature of the artist in English and numbered 13/20, executed in 2006, produced by The Gallery Mourmans, number 13 from a limited edition of 20

Gallery Mourmans, Maastricht
Private Collection, Europe

This work is generally in good condition. There is indication of minor wear and handling around the edges.
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Space and Sculptural Objects


The essence of art is that it allows artists to express their own intellectual world and their own intrinsic individuality. Historically, various artists have shown phenomenal abilities in transforming banal objects into powerful and unique works of art. For them, their skill and ingenuity are crucial to the transcendence of art into functional form, and more importantly, to providing endless possibilities for bridging art with the everyday.  

Notably, the Nouveau Realism movement has been interested in new approaches to the concept of reality in art, which was founded by Arman, one of the most famous French sculptors. Arman adopted destruction as a strategy for creating something new by slicing, burning, and smashing objects such as musical instruments as seen in Birds of Paradise (Lot 27). This unique and exquisite sculpture illustrates the essence of objectification by alternating the physical constructions of objects. Arman incorporates the act of construction and destruction into a single piece of art, and guides us through the stages of his creative process. He produces original forms and novel ways in appreciating the newly discovered aesthetic objectives and urges us to observe these usual objects from a completely different perspective.

Yves Klein, who was a fellow Nouveau Realist and a close friend of Arman’s, is best known for his trademark ultramarine pigment, which he patented as International Klein Blue in 1961. He believed in the purity element and first created three acrylic boxes each with a single element inside - IKB pigment, pink pigment, and gold leaf – in 1959 as an offering to an Italian monastery as to celebrate the commission of his mural by the Opera House. This design morphed into giant transparent boxes as coffee tables, which Klein conceived in 1961.  Within the iconic Table d’Or (Lot 29), 3000 sheets of glimmering gold leaves shimmer under the transparent Plexiglas and exquisitely express the notion that Klein espouses, that of living surrounded by purity.

Claude Lalanne, one of the luminaries in 20^th century design, is trained as an architect. Together with her late husband, François-Xavier, they are renowned for producing ingenious three-dimensional works that straddle the line between sculpture and functional objects. Her diverse body of sculptural work ranges  from large-scale animal figures to furniture that are organic and whimsical. Stylized magical branches, vines and leaves, as shown in Table ‘Ginkgo Biloba’ (Lot 31), Lalanne and her husband chose not to embrace the abstract art movement that pervaded the mid-20th century art world. Instead, Claude Lalanne preferred to bring into daily life the magic of surreal imagination: the world of fairy tales and fantasy. This approach has won her great acclaim among curators and collectors alike, including Yves Saint Laurent, who commissioned Lalanne to create a mirrored room with vine-like moldings for his home.

Ron Arad has commanded a unique and prolific role in the art, architectural, and design spheres for 30 years. Combining playful forms and experiments with advanced technology, Ron Arad has emerged as one of the most influential designers of our time, famous for his metal furniture designs characterised by inventive shapes. The Blo-Void 5 (Lot 30) design is one of Ron Arad's most acclaimed chair designs. With its sculptural vitality, the chair carried forward Arad's exploration of volume that began in the 1990s, as he continues to engineer and interpret the relationship between sculpture and seating with the aid of technological developments in computer design. Throughout his career, the artist remains determined in provoking the proscribed limits of his materials by giving formal expression to his seemingly unbuildable ideas. Challenging the barriers of perception, the ergonomic curves of the Blo-Void chair molds the body and is surprisingly comfortable to occupy, contradictory to the hardness of the material. Its textured surface, partly polished into a mirror finish, partly non-reflective, produces a stunning interaction with its environment.

Arad, Arman, Klein and Lalanne had transformed mundane common objects into stunning art pieces that merge fine aesthetics with everyday life, at once establishing that boundaries between the two categories should not necessarily exist. This remarkable and unique group of works further illustrates the novel visual culture established by the artists’ unprecedented vision, and exemplifies how space can enhance the beauty of sculptural objects and thus the experience of living with art.